Once in a while I come across an article that really speaks to me. This one by Xavier C. Montecel on the NCR site was such an article. The whole piece is worth reading, but I will highlight some parts of it:
"Whether Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, people will be mourning. As they have grieved over loved ones lost during the pandemic, over the loss of physical closeness to friends and family, and over the absence of so many social goods once taken for granted, so also will many grieve over the loss of the sacramental body and blood of Christ. And they are right to do so."
"...How can we go on being a eucharistic people, indeed an Easter people, without the Lord's Supper?"
"Perhaps one way of answering this question is to take our grief and search for the grace that resides within it."
"...The Eucharist itself is not confined to the tabernacle or to the time we set aside for liturgy. How could it be? In the sacrament of Christ's body and blood, God is reaching out to all of us, to all of history, and bringing it to share in his life. At the altar of Communion, we give the whole world to God and receive it back as a new world: as the promise of eternal life."
"...Spiritual Communion has now become the only option for most of us, and so we may be tempted to think of it as a sort of half-measure or consolation prize. As modern people, we usually think of what is spiritual as less real than what is physical. If we cannot receive the Eucharist in a physical way, then we are forced by circumstances to accept a means of Communion that seems less real."
"...However, I believe this kind of attitude misses something essential. Spiritual Communion is not, in fact, some kind of lesser substitute for the real thing. To the contrary, the Catholic tradition teaches us that spiritual Communion is precisely the purpose of the Eucharist and its deepest reality."
"...The sacramentum tantum, or the first level, consists in the matter and form of the sacrament, and every visible element that makes up our embodied experience of Communion. Bread and wine are taken, blessed, broken and given."
These things serve as signs of what is there invisibly, a deeper reality apprehended by the eyes of faith: the personal presence of Jesus Christ in his body, blood, soul and divinity. That is the second level, or the sacramentum et res, so called because it is a reality signified but also serves as a sign of something else, something even deeper.
That final reality, the res tantum, is the goal and purpose of the sacrament itself: the spiritual Communion of the faithful as one body in Christ, gathered by the Holy Spirit and sharing eschatologically in the heavenly banquet of God's life.
Spiritual Communion, therefore, is what the Eucharist is all about. And it is not taken away from us because we have been prevented this Easter from receiving the sacrament in person.
"...Moreover, our physical separation from the Eucharist does not take away our ability to participate in the sacrifice of the Lord's Supper. What deeper sacrifice can we now make than to give up those forms of bodily intimacy that nourish us?"
"Perhaps in the days to come, when we are feeling keenly the pain of separation from the Eucharist and from one another, we can offer this pain as a sacrifice to God. Not because God demands it of us, but rather because we know that in God's hands, pain is transformed into life."
This really brought home to me that our prayers, virtual liturgies, and spiritual communions are not just some kind of make-believe to get us by until we can gather again as the people of God. It is as St. Paul tells us, "...that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39).
I don't know whether God makes life out of pain. Catholic notions of suffering often elude me.
ReplyDeleteBut I do like the idea that God's presence is not confined to the bread and wine, but is only one of many ways that God reaches us.
This seems obvious to me, brought up largely outside of organized religion, but whom notions of God managed to penetrate despite discouragement of all religious impulses as a child and young adult.
God makes a difference in our individual lives ... and thereby in the lives of others we meet when we are trying to do God's work.
In this way, don't we occasionally serve others as vessels of the eucharist?
I certainly feel that way about all of you at times.
The eucharist is in all of us all the time.
Jean I love your insight! You are right that there many ways of encountering God.
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DeleteJim, I do hope that Jean’s comment isn’t the first time that you realized that God is everywhere - and that encounters with God occur far more frequently outside of churches than in them.
DeleteGod’s “real presence” is not confined to a tabernacle!
Anne, thanks. As a matter of fact, it's a frequent trope of my preaching.
DeleteToday's first reading from Acts describes life in the first communities of the Way ("Christian" not yet being recognized by the O.E.D or anyone else): They "devoted themselves" to teaching, communal life and "the breaking of the bread." The bread came third. Community came second.
ReplyDeleteI have been able to get along on the virtual sacrament because I know the priests, deacons, lectors, music ministers and altar on the computer screen. When I talked to one of the folks who call parishioners to make sure everyone is OK, I told her we pretend she is with us at the video Mass every morning, as she used to be live and in person. It's not the real thing, but it is more than peeking through the fence.
I know people who are hop-scotching around. Bishop Barron's video Mass seems popular here. My alma mater is doing a regular Mass on Tuesday nights in the St. Joan chapel, which I saw before it was moved to Milwaukee. With them being an hour behind, the time difference nay be tricky, but I am tempted. But community is something Americans slough off too easily as it is. It's kicky to do your own thing, and "Me + God" may be our biggest national church. That isn't working out well. If we get more virtual spirituality and less togetherness out of this crisis, I don't think we come out ahead.
We're also sticking with our local livestream. Like you say, the faces are familiar. An anonymous donor furnished the funds to do it, and News Channel Nebraska does a nice job with the streaming. Bless the anonymous donor, it can't be cheap.
DeleteWe did try the archdiocese site for the Easter Vigil at the cathedral. Aside from getting to hear some Palestrina, it was a penitential experience. Very glitchy and rough transmission.
""Me + God" may be our biggest national church"
DeleteToo right.
The challenge for most Catholics is to integrate the personal and the communal. It is a both/and.
ReplyDeleteEastern Christians have a interesting way of looking at Liturgy. They talk about the Heavenly Liturgy, the Earthly Liturgy, and the Liturgy of the Heart.
The Heavenly Liturgy is the Angelic Liturgy, the Eschatological Liturgy where all the Mysteries (Trinity, Incarnation, Redemption, Resurrection, Pentecost) are fully present.
The Earthly Liturgy of the Church reflects and participates in the Heavenly Liturgy in an imperfect way through the sacraments and the liturgical year, and the liturgy of the hours.
The Liturgy of the Heart is the presence of God within each Christian as creation, incarnation, redemption, resurrection, and outpouring of the Spirit. The cult of the saints reflects the importance of the Liturgy of Heart. Each saint is another way of following Christ, another commentary upon Scripture.
Unlike ourselves early Christianity did not separate the personal evident in the lives of solitaries (the Liturgy of the Heart) from the communal (the Earthly Liturgy). They saw them both as reflections of the Heavenly Liturgy and worthy of veneration
For example especially in monasteries of Palestine, monks left the monastery and its liturgies (sometimes on the Octave day of Epiphany and sometimes the first day of Lent) and spent their whole time alone in the desert in imitation of Christ, coming back to the monastery in the Palm Sunday procession.
Other desert solitaries stayed away from parish and/or communal monastic liturgies for years and even decades. Yet they were still venerated and pilgrimages were made to their cells.
Actually there were more women solitaries than male solitaries but they withdrew not to the desert but the solitude of the inner rooms of their homes. Male church leaders encouraged them not to come to the Cathedral liturgies except on special occasions, in part because virgins were a distraction to the men of the congregation (this was the beginning of our notion of cloister). Jerome even translated the Greek of the NT which encourages us to retire to pray in a room of our house as a cubiculum, Latin for the inner rooms of a house not accessible to the general public.
Remember that Christ himself frequently withdrew from the disciples to spend time in prayer, and recommended that we not spend our time like the Pharisees in public prayer to impress others that we are religious.
Jack, I agree that it is a challenge to integrate the personal and the communal, and that it needs to be both/and. And intriguing concept about the heavenly liturgy, earthly liturgy, and the liturgy of the heart. I had not heard it put that way before. Jesus gave the example of integrating the personal and communal.
DeleteAbout the male church leaders encouraging the solitary women not to frequent the public liturgies so as not to be a distraction to the men, I'm just glad I live now, even with all its problems.
Actually the women were able to participate in the liturgies of the house churches which remained important even as the basilica liturgies and the liturgies at the cemeteries (martyrs) grew in importance.
DeleteIn both Rome and Constantinople the household churches of wealthy families were an important complement to the newly built cathedrals and basilicas. And women were prominent leaders in household churches even though they were not in the basilicas which were part of the male public domain.
Wealthy Roman houses were a way station between the public and the private. The head of the household as a patron regularly received courtship from his clients. The women household leaders were prominent players in all the avant-garde religious life which included relics, visiting monks and religious dignitaries.
Jerome for example was spiritual director and financially backed by a group of Roman women which enabled him to go to the Holy Land and set up a monastic like intellectual community there.
In this world, bishops were not yet as powerful as they would later become. They tended to be chosen from a slightly lower class than the women Christians leaders were. That was because traditionally Roman males held priesthoods which were an important part of Roman civic life. Real life is always more complicated than sexual stereotypes. Women do exercise leadership even when the society does not acknowledge it.
Jack, a good reminder that things are often more complex than they appear, and that we need to read events of the past in the context in which they occurred.
DeleteLike Jack, I am attracted to monasticism, though not really drawn by elaborate eastern liturgies as he is. God draws each of us in specific ways. I am especially attracted to silence. I find God in silence.
ReplyDeleteThere are a handful of spiritual writers who kept me christian during times when it had made no sense to me at all. One of them is Joan Chittister OSB. I subscribe to a daily email from her group. Today's email seems appropriate to the topics-
The very thought of simply listening
Of all the attitudes we bring to prayer, presence is at once one of the simplest and one of the most difficult. Buddhists call it “taming a monkey mind.” We call it the need to resist distractions. Whatever any of us call it, the effects of the condition are the same. We begin to feel far away, even alienated, from the God who seems so far away from us. However much time we put into saying our prayers and going to church, God remains more an idea than a reality. We look for God “to come.” We do not expect to find God here.
But where else would God be, if not here? And if God is here, what creates the Plexiglass between us? “God,” Scripture says, “is not in the whirlwind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire.” God, Scripture says, “is in the small still voice within.” So what is blocking us from making the journey within?
Sinking down into the self where the Spirit resides and the waters run deep is close to impossible in a culture built on noise and talk and information and advertisements and constant movement and a revolving door schedule. Silence and solitude are lightyears away from the raging list of unending activities we carry in our heads.
Even most of the praying we do is noisy. We say prayers; we seldom sit in the presence of God and wait. The very thought of simply listening for the whisper of the soft, still voice within is not only rare, it is uncomfortable these days. Shouldn’t we be doing something, our souls shout at us. Shouldn’t we be going somewhere, doing something, at least saying something holy?
But it is the voice of God within that brings calm and direction. It drains the negative energy out of the present so that we can go on, calmly aware that there is nowhere where we are alone.
This kind of prayer prepares us to feel the presence of God everywhere because we have discovered that the presence of God is within. It enables us to respond to it in waves of trust that carry us far beyond the storms of the present to the fullness of the future.
—from The Breath of the Soul: Reflections on Prayer (
Thanks for sharing that, Anne. I also find God in silence.
DeleteAnd unfortunately I am very familiar with my "monkey mind".
DeleteThat is so true. Take it from me, the father general of the Brothers of Perpetual Distraction.
DeleteJust dropped by to see if there were any new topics, and, because it's late, I read the header on this thread as: "Nothing can SPARE us from the love of God."
ReplyDeleteSome kind of subconscious interpretation? Certainly God can be relentless in his pursuit of us. And he never stops holding up our faults.
If God's ways are not our ways, perhaps we have to assume God's love is also different from ours. Fierce, implacable, demanding, consuming. Certainly not warm and fuzzy.
He may dry every tear in heaven. Because we're going to shed plenty here.
Jean, I Fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
DeleteI fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Obviously.
"Nothing can SPARE us from the love of God". But it's true. God as Tiger Mom?
DeleteI also think of 2 Peter 3:15, "Our Lord's patience is directed towards salvation." He's playing a long game, a really long one. Sometimes I wish he wouldn't be patient with some of the stuff he allows to go on. Except part of that stuff is me.
Yeah, Hound of Heaven.
DeleteGod is not a "nice person." One-track mind, and no point in rationalizing or trying to offer mitigating excuses. The original "wake up and die right" guy. The overbearing parent who never stops nagging.
Hard to believe this is the path to Everlasting Joy.
And yet Jesus didn't condemn sinners. He ate with them and hung out with them.
DeleteThere are Christian thinkers out there who don’t buy into the whole God as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner tradition.
ReplyDeleteNagging parent, but loving and endlessly patient and endlessly forgiving parent maybe.
Who wants to spend eternity with a mean ogre after all?
The Catholic Church I grew up in only taught we terrified kids of the 50s and 60s the first version. That’s one reason about 2/3 of my friends, raised Catholic and educated in Catholic schools for 16 years, didn’t stay Catholic. The losses didn’t start with the millennials, but with JPII and the boomers. Vatican II kept some of us in for a long time, but many, like me, gave up after seeing what JPII and B16 were doing.
Not all of the ever growing cohort of “nones” are under 40. There are a whole lot of “dones” out there too. We are the ones who aren’t demanding that our kids marry in the RCC or that they baptize our grandchildren Catholic either, as our own parents did with us. Largely ignored phenomenon though with all the focus on those who still might produce children to fill the pews, and the collection baskets, in the future.
Anne, Christian -- yea, verily, even Catholic -- thinkers who don't buy into sinners in the hands of an avenging God are not only not just "out there," they are everywhere. If anything, I'd say there are too many doing it too facilely in the church of the IOK, UOK. "Yes, I know, I shouldn't be getting my little bit on the side, but God understands. I am a man and he made me a man, so I neeeed my little bit on the side. Alleluia." I mean, there is a lot of that going around these days.
DeleteBut you might be astonished to read "Is That All There Is?" by Gerhard Lohfink, a theologian in good standing, whose thoughts on what happens after death just came out in paperback from Liturgical Press. Simplifying, when you die you arrive at the Last Judgment -- everybody's, including those who lived before you and those who will come after. It's pretty neat.
And you gotta love a German theologian who uses his opening chapters to do textual analysis of paid obits in newspapers.
Your experience of the '50s and '60s is not universal. I came up in the '40s and '50s, and practitioners of scaring us straight were considered fringey then,* and when I taught CCD in the '60s, Hell never came up unless some kid had been reading some book little Catholics shouldn't read and asked about it.
*I do remember one teaching Sister who claimed the pope had had a vision of Chinese troops watering their horses in Rome. (Must have been reading some premature John Birch literature.) That was, maybe, fourth grade. My mother marched down and had a talk with the principal, and that was the end of unauthorized visions. One of her points: Modern armies have tanks, not horses. What I took out of that was that my mother knew a lot about armies.
My favorite all-time pastor, who is a year older than I, grew up in Ireland. He said American homes with crucifixes everywhere are depressing. Yes, there is the cross, but we overdo it. At his home they had only a painting of the Sacred Heart with a vigil light in front of it, and that is the Catholicism he preaches. (Imo, The Divine Mercy, which is currently all the rage, is the Sacred Heart for dummies. But that's just dicta.)
I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and IOK/UOK is pretty much all that was on offer. (Or banners of butterflies and balloons, if you wish). Our image of God was the kindly grandfather (to use one of CS Lewis's metaphors of what God isn't), but who was with us always - so sort of a helicopter grandparent.
DeleteWith that as background, my dive into the psalter at the inception of my praying the Liturgy of the Hours raised some difficulties. God seemed, if not exactly crankier, at least a good deal more complicated. He is, by turns, mighty, creative, loving, covenant-making, angry, disappointed, forgiving, justice-dispensing, war-making and so on. Most of those were hard to illustrate with felt butterflies. But when you stop to think about it a moment, that complexity is a good deal more *real* - it's the same sort of amalgam of different "sides" that we see in our own parents, spouses, friends. It makes it a lot easier to grasp that he is a *person*, complete with personality, and not just a friendly or unfriendly ghost.
The notion that salvation and judgment are cumulative, not individual, is an interesting idea. Kudos for reading German theology, which often strikes me as speculative science fiction only without the exciting plot. I leave it to Raber to give me the Cliff Notes on these things.
DeleteI see God as mostly remote and uncaring, kind of like a negligent pet owner. Fundamentalists and evangelicals keep believing they are favored pets, and the extent to which they try to explain bad things that happen to them as signs of favor is often heart-breaking. My Baptist in-laws lost a son by cerebral hemorrhage at age 8. His mother said God took him to spare him from becoming a murderer or a homosexual.
Jesus often seems like kind of a smart-ass--talking in riddles, amazing people with miracles, and showing off with transfigurations and other signs.
The Jesus in the Garden seems most real to me. It is the suffering that makes all the rest believable.
A lot of that anger you run into is projection on the part of the writer. If Jesus was the Son of God, "remote and uncaring" are not good adjectives for him. If he wasn't, of course, there is nothing to see here.
DeleteI am a shaky and imperfect believer, Tom. I think God the Father is negligent, even sadistic (read Job), though, yes, those who passed Scripture on to us were likely coloring in details for specific times and places.
DeleteI find Jesus the Son puzzling, inconsistent, and his actions open to a lot of interpretation.
Belief for me starts with his willingness to die, not with how nice he was.
I think most scripture scholars consider Job a work of fiction. I certainly agree with you that it doesn't portray God in a good light. Even though there are beautiful passages, especially in the King James version, I really can't get anything out of it in a spiritual sense. Especially the added on ending where everybody is happily ever after. Loss is never like that, children don't get "replaced".
DeleteDeacon Jim, Though I may have overlapped with your religious education teachers, I must insist that, just as Der Fuhrer never says "babeee," I never used banners, butterflies or balloons. I did use Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Babi Yar one week with interesting results among those who weren't there.
DeleteTom, according to my non-random group of family and friends, raised RC in devout homes and RC schools for 16 years, it may be that your experience was atypical. Count yourself among the lucky exceptions.
ReplyDeleteWe were told that slipping up for a moment, and getting hit by a car and dying before we could go to confession would bring us an eternity of excruciating suffering - for "mortal sins" such as eating a hamburger on a Friday. One small example of how they terrorized kids. Fear of a harsh and judgmental God was drilled into us. Every "sin" - even the most minor - made us contributors to Jesus' agony - that it was as if we were pounding a nail into his feet, and that our sins, with everyone else's, were responsible for Jesus' suffering. God was such an angry, vengeful God, that only the gruesome suffering and death of Jesus would be enough to appease him, enough for him to have mercy on sinners, and forgive them.
It was decades before I started studying atonement theology - because it was one of the teachings that was not only driving me out of the RCC, but away from christianity completely. I didn't even know the term "atonement theology" when I started searching for clarity. I had come to believe that Jesus didn't die to "redeem" us because otherwise God would not forgive human sinners. I came to believe that Jesus died to show us that in living we might be asked to die for what is right, for truth, for good. He was an example of how living and teaching truth could lead to suffering and death. But he did not die because God would not otherwise forgive human sin. Eventually I discovered other theologians, both from centuries ago and recently, who didn't teach atonement theology either. But I had to find them by myself. Catholic priests were pretty much useless when it came to tough questions. They parrot what they were taught as kids, or in seminary, and get that deer in the headlights look when pressed with questions beyond the elementary catechism level.
As I said, most of my Catholic friends (my college friends mostly because I moved when I was 10 to a small, rural community with few Catholics and no RC school) left the church - some immediately upon graduation, some years later.
Jim, I would say that if the religious educators were going to err, erring in the direction of butterflies and rainbows was a lot better than erring on the side of an unloving and cruel God.
Twenty or so years ago I listened to a talk by Richard Rohr - I had the cassette tape and would listen while I did my daily walks. At the end of the talk he took questions. One was a question about the God described in the Hebrew Scriptures - a God very often of anger, wrath, and a God who would wipe out innocent people who didn't happen to be members of a tribe of Israel. A violent God. RR used a phrase I have never forgotten - he said that the ancient scriptures were a "text in travail". I looked that up just now, and found a series of brief descriptions online about what he meant by that. They were delivered as brief summaries in email many years after I first heard him use it. They are at the CAC website. Begin reading with Sunday, and continue through Friday. Very brief. More complete discussion in his book.
https://cac.org/bible-text-travail-weekly-summary-2015-02-14/
But I continued to wrestle with scriptures. Then, about ten years ago, I read Reading the Bible Again for the First Time by Marcus Borg. Another christian teacher who helped me stay Christian. He calls the Bible “sacred” scripture, but he does not define this in the way most Christians are taught. I had finally found a way to read the bible and have it make sense to me.
I see the Bible as a human response to God. Rather than seeing God as Scripture's ultimate author, I see the Bible as the response of these two ancient communities (the Hebrews and the early Christians) to their experience of God.
A response to their experience of God, that is also how I see it, especially the Old Testament. I'm not saying at all that they didn't experience God, just that we are seeing God through their filters.
DeleteAnne, Good Lord, the religious education you remember was appalling. When I was in high school I encountered a book -- the author may have been Barnabas Ahern, or my memory may be conflating books -- that demonstrated the the OT and NT were the story of freedom. I took this amazing discovery to a priest, who smiled and said you can read Scripture as he story of freedom. Yes. Or the story of justice. Or the story of fortitude. Or the story of... Lots of possibilities. He wanted to get me into dialogue with the OT and NT themselves and not just taking the word of commentators.
DeleteInteresting that age and experience with the Church and Scripture color our views even in this tiny group. My upbringing, which was not trinitarian--Jesus was human only, at most the first among prophets--certainly colors my notions here.
ReplyDeleteI think balloons, banners, and butterflies affected every denomination in the 1960/70s. As Anne implies, it was a response to the fire and brimstone of an earlier era.
Both are nauseating in their own way.
I got in on both worlds. Had Baltimore catechism in lower grade school, but things had started to change by middle school. It was a year or two before the end of Vatican II, but we had some scripture study, which I thought was interesting. In high school it was CCD class, with lay teachers. One was a lawyer who talked about moral theology. Another was a farmer. I just remember that he told the girls not to date any guy who was unkind to animals or his younger siblings, or was disrespectful to his parents. Good advice. There were some "youth rallies", which I didn't particularly like, but all in all it wasn't that bad.
DeleteCoincidentally a few days ago I read that the sister who had been my 1st and 2nd grade teacher had passed away at the age of 100. She had been a nun for 81 years. She has earned her reward. And her rest.
Balloons, banners and butterflies AND rainbows. (Although there is some biblical basis for the last.)
DeleteVery true about the biblical basis for rainbows. Offhand I can't think of any appearances of butterflies in the bible. There are various citations of moths, which are sort of like butterflies (or so I thought when I was a kid), but moths are not viewed fondly by the biblical authors - they devour cloth and clothing. E.g. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." (Mt 6:19).
DeleteButterflies are often used in art as a symbol of the resurrection.
ReplyDelete